emptybill, following up on your last sentence below, how is it possible for a teacher to cheat a disciple "out of the self-evaluations necessary for real sadhana." Surely the disciple has some say in the matter. Do you think this is what happened to Robin?
On Friday, January 17, 2014 8:58 PM, "emptyb...@yahoo.com" <emptyb...@yahoo.com> wrote: Michael sez: "Robin's experience was that his actions were, as it were, dictated by cosmic forces, rather than that he could just do whatever he felt like. His experience was that he could not do other than what he did, even though at times there was some aspect of himself that didn't want to do what he was doing." So bottom line I don't buy Robin's assertion that he in essence was forced to behave in this way by these "forces." That excuse goes back as long as we have had the idea of a Devil. Emptybill replies: Robin never was interested in a classical Vedantic assessment of his so-called “enlightenment”. All of this, in spite of the fact that Shankara’s Vedanta was the proffered basis of Maharishi’s tradition. Such an assessment would have presented an opposite view about this whole “enlightenment meme”. I pointed this out to Robin a number of times but he wasn’t interested in hearing about it. Rather he just wanted to espouse his chosen narrative about how he was deluded by “cosmic entities” but was now free of them. More of the old - “I didn’t fail … I was fooled” as you also pointed out. This is what happens when experience itself becomes the object of sadhana (practice) rather than conformity with Reality. It is the same old theme and “gurus” just fool people when they cheat them out of the self-evaluations necessary for real sadhana.
